CHAPTER FIVE
Threads to Pull
I slept for an hour that afternoon and woke up with the taste of dust in my mouth. The folder Leo had given me sat on my kitchen table like something alive—papers breathing slow, waiting. I didn't want to touch it. I also couldn't stop looking at it.
He had left as if he expected me to open it. He'd told me to be careful. He'd told me things he hated saying out loud. Mason's old photo stared up at me from the pile, the man with the scar on his cheek—Jonah before Jonah, the name he'd hidden under. Mason. A shadow with a better name.
I poured coffee and then poured another. My hands didn't stop shaking. The apartment hummed with the small noises of my life—my kettle, the buzz of the heater. It felt obscene to be warm while my brother's life had ended in cold questions and empty rooms.
I took the folder. The paper inside smelled like old smoke and late nights. Receipts, half-burned notes, a business card with a number, a map folded wrong. Each piece felt like a small nail fastening the truth to a coffin. I read Jonah's handwriting again and again, the slanted letters that used to make me smile when he left notes on my mirror. Now they made my chest tighten.
There was one line that repeated, in different pages: Don't let them find the papers. Hide them well. He had been hiding something. He was hiding more than his own life. He was hiding things that could hurt other people, maybe people he loved.
I called Leo before I knew I would. My voice was small.
"I'm looking through his things," I said. "There's a name—Mason. A map. A note that says don't let them find the papers."
Silence on the other end. Then, "I told you—be careful."
"I have to keep going."
"You should not do this alone."
"You came to me," I said. "You gave me the folder. You told me he trusted you."
Another quiet breath. "Then we do it together."
We met at the edge of the market, under the flapping awnings where the air smelled of bread and diesel. He was waiting with two coffees, one lukewarm, one too hot for the cold. His hands were rough in the way I had never seen when he'd tried to be gentle with Jonah. Now those hands looked like they had held harder things.
"You said you loved him," I said without warning. The words fell between us, simple, raw.
He didn't blink. "I did. I do." He looked older than the man in the photo. Older than the man who had been my brother's friend. "I hated him the same way."
We walked. I showed him the map pushed into my coat pocket. It led to a part of town I knew by name but not by heart—the docks, the warehouses with broken windows, the places where people moved without asking to be seen.
"Jonah met people there," Leo said. "People he shouldn't have trusted. People who could make a life ugly, fast."
He watched my face like watching the slow burn of a match. "If he hid papers," Leo said, "then someone wanted those papers gone."
We went to the address on the receipt. It was a café that looked like it had survived a hundred winters. The owner, a woman with paint on her hands, remembered Jonah at once. She remembered the way he always sat by the window, the way he asked for black coffee and an extra croissant even when he couldn't afford it.
"He was kind," she said. "Quiet. He read a lot. Left a few things behind once, but nothing important."
"Did he ever tell you a name?" I asked.
She paused like a page she was trying to find. "Mason," she said finally. "He used that name sometimes. Said he used it when he was angry or afraid."
We left the café with another small thread in our hands and a feeling like we had passed a place Jonah had stood. It made my breath sharp—proof that he had been real, been there, been someone's light.
A man across the street watched us leave. He didn't try to hide it. His stare burned like a brand. I felt it on my skin, and my stomach folded tight.
"Don't look back," Leo said so quietly I almost missed it. He put his hand on my arm. It was meant to steady me, but instead it sent a current through everything.
We traced Jonah's steps for days the way some people follow a map to treasure. There were phone numbers that were disconnected, a postbox with a key gone, a note with a half address. A cleaner in a community center remembered seeing Jonah once with a man who had a scar like the one in the photograph. He'd waved and walked away. Small things. Points on a dot-to-dot that promised a picture if we had patience to join them.
It was getting colder. The sky looked like pressed paper. People moved in their jackets with the kind of speed that had no time for questions.
Someone left me a message on my gallery voicemail that night: static, then a voice low and tired. Stop digging, Amara. Leave it buried. Then the line went dead. My stomach dropped as if someone had removed the floor under me.
I listened to the message three times, thinking maybe the voice would change. It didn't. The voice felt close enough to touch and far enough away to be a dream.
"Who could that be?" I asked Leo when we met the next morning.
He did not answer at once. He slid a paper across the table to me—one of Jonah's receipts with a stamped logo on it. A company name I didn't recognize.
"This company," Leo said. "They come up a lot. They do things that don't need paper—keep records off the books. People who deal in disappearing items."
"Disappearing items?" I echoed. The idea shredded my calm.
"Secrets," he said. "People pay to make what they fear vanish. Records, files, people."
My hands went numb. Jonah had been keeping something that someone would pay to erase.
"Then we find where they keep the rest," I said.
Leo's eyes were steady but there was a thin flash of something—fear or meaning—that I saw only once, when he touched my hand lightly and held it like he could hold me from slipping down a hole.
We went to the address on the receipt that afternoon. A warehouse near the river, steel doors rolling closed, the smell of salt and old oil. The dockworkers looked at us like we had stepped into the wrong part of a story. There was no bell to ring, no sign of a welcome. I felt my breath hitch. My fingers clutched the folder like a talisman.
We found a side door that stuck and then gave with a groan. Inside it was dark, heavy with the odor of things hidden too long. Stacks of boxes leaned like sleeping giants. A forklift hummed somewhere deeper, as if the building were breathing in its sleep.
Someone moved in the shadow at the far corner. A shape, then a voice.
"You shouldn't be here."
A man stepped forward—coat long, face cut by a scar like the one in the photograph. My mouth went dry. That scar. It was the same, exact line. Close to my skin I felt Jonah spin.
"Who are you?" I asked, my voice small.
He looked at me like he had seen me before, in a different life perhaps. "You're Jonah's sister," he guessed, not a question.
"Yes." My throat closed. "What happened to him?"
He closed his coat tighter. "You don't want to know, little bird." He used a word I had never heard him use in letters. It sounded like iron. "Leave it."
Leo stepped in front of me, slow and steady as a tide. "We won't. Tell us where Jonah went."
The scarred man's eyes flicked to Leo. For a second, something almost like recognition flared—anger that was old. He spat a name. "Mason paid what he had to keep them quiet. But men like Mason make debts. They cannot pay forever."
"Mason?" I repeated, sharp.
The man shrugged. "Mason had enemies. He wanted the next life. It didn't go right."
My fingers tightened on the folder until the edges dug in. This was the answer and not the answer. Words that smelled like smoke and closed doors.
"He had people watching him. Watching anyone with his things. If they think you have what he left—" The man's hand made a small cutting motion near his throat.
We left the warehouse with more fear than facts. The world felt smaller, more dangerous. We kept our heads low, walking back to the street where the city's hum continued like nothing had shifted.
At home, I spread the papers out again. Each page looked darker now. The name Mason kept rising like a tide. He was Jonah's old self and maybe the reason Jonah had tried to die with a different face.
My phone buzzed. A text from an unknown number: We're watching. No punctuation. No warmth.
I read it and felt cold. The walls of my apartment pressed in.
Leo walked in soon after, quiet. We looked at each other and the worry passed between us like a current.
"We're close," he said.
"Close to what?" I snapped. My voice surprised me—too sharp. It cut the room.
"Close to the truth," he said gently. "And that truth will make people move."
Someone knocked then, lightly at first, like a branch against glass. We both froze.
"Who is it?" I asked, though I knew we shouldn't open the door.
No answer. The knock came again, harder this time.
Leo moved to the door first. He opened it slowly.
There was a small envelope on the mat. No one in the hall. No shadow, no breath. Just the envelope, white against the grey doorstep.
Inside, a single photograph. Jonah, smiling—but this time he was older in the picture, older and standing with a man whose face I didn't fully see. The back of the photo held one line, written in a hand I could never mistake.
You were not supposed to find this, Em.
My fingers trembled and the room tilted.
Leo's voice was soft as a separate room: "We should have left the past buried."
"I can't," I said. "Not now."
He didn't take the photo. He didn't try to stop me. He sat on the floor and leaned against the wall. "Then we move, carefully."
I folded the photograph and tucked it into the folder. The pieces were heavier now, the map harder to follow.
Somebody knew we were holding the map. Somebody did not want it read.
Outside, the city moved on, ignorant and exact. Inside, our small light burned—a promise and a warning.
I pressed my palm flat against the table and felt the paper's pulse. I thought of Jonah knocking on my door, twice, pause, once more—our secret rhythm. I thought of Leo in the photograph with his arm around Jonah, as if saying he was there. I thought of Mason and debts and men who made dangers for others.
There were threads to pull, and I would pull them all. I would follow each one until the whole tapestry came loose. I would find Jonah's place in the pattern, even if it meant burning everything that kept it hidden.
A sound at the window made me flinch. A shadow crossed the glass.
Someone was watching. Someone close.
I moved to the sill, heart loud. The streetlight threw a long, thin rectangle across the pavement. In it, a shape leaned. Not moving, just watching.
I wanted to shout. I wanted to run. Instead, I stood very still and whispered Jonah's name into the dark.
He did not answer.
But somewhere, someone answered worse.
A phone vibrated on the table. Leo picked it up.
A photo filled the screen. Me—taken from behind, entering a coffee shop earlier that day. The caption beneath read: We see you. Leave it alone.
My breath left me like a dropped coin.
Leo's face turned hard as stone.
"We are not alone," he said.
And in the thin sliver of light on the table, the folder looked like a map to a place that wanted no visitors.
Then the lights went out.